Prior to the server and storage consolidation, the H50 mainframe ran Palm Beach Community College's ERP system, and the Shark was the cornerstone of a SAN.

Data loss concerns

Charles King, principal analyst at PundIT Inc. in Hayward, Calif., said that although virtualization technologies such as VMware and SVC are mature, enterprises have been dragging their feet about turning to the technology for fear of data loss.

The Palm Beach Community College virtualization project is even rarer than most, King said, because technology from two vendors is being used together across a single infrastructure. Taking "relatively disparate products and [putting] them together in creative ways seems to me to say virtualization is finally here," he said.

Parziale said implementing VMware on his servers and IBM's SVC virtualization appliance in front of new Fibre Channel switches from Brocade Communications Systems Inc. has created some "territorial issues," including user resistance to having to ask for increases in storage volumes. But the savings far outweigh the push-back, he said.